2014 Jeep Patriot — the car from yesteryear that should have stayed in yesteryear

This is one of those reviews where you strive to find something nice to say and so we shall say it up front, at the top of the broadcast. In a world of high-tech, optioned-up, automatic-everything, computer-controlled whiz-bang techno-geek sleds, the Jeep Patriot stands out as the car of yesteryear.

No frills. No thrills, either, but the no frills aspect was kind of endearing. Our first impression of the Jeep Patriot was that here is a retro car. Retro back to the Eighties, maybe even earlier. And how do we judge that?

The Patriot is a boxy, stand-alone not very modern SUV whose 2.4-liter four-banger engine is banger-banger noisy, whose six-speed automatic transmission sometimes has trouble finding the right gear and whose overall demeanor is one of throwback to the way cars used to be, assuming that is an attribute, which, for the most part, it is not.

Cars actually have improved over the past half century, with great strides in reliability, safety and electronics, among other things. Even the Patriot’s stable-mate, the Grand Cherokee SRT8 SUV, is leagues ahead of the Patriot (it’s also about three times the price, when loaded up with options.) But all these “advances” have made cars nightmarishly complicated that requires hundreds of pages in owner’s manuals to tell us how to operate our expensive new toys.

What we have in the Patriot is a car with a stark black interior and few of the modern gizmos we are starting to take for granted – no auto-headlight-on-and-off; no antenna buried in the glass (the Patriot had a standard metal antenna drilled into the right front fender, as God meant for cars to have ever since Marconi first started sending signals.)

Coming off road tests of cars loaded with technology (new Acura RLX SH-AWD hybrid; Infiniti QX70, for example), I found the Patriot refreshing in a weird, nostalgic kind of way. Yes, it did have doors that automatically locked, once the Patriot was moving down the road, but they did so with a big, loud clunk. Yes, there’s a modern navigation system, melded in with the modern stereo, but all of it is housed in a plain, stark black dashboard that is, well, timeless.

Stomping on the gas pedal gave us a huge loud roar as the 172-horsepower engine told this bucking bronco to git up and go. The six-speed AutoStick® transmission had a weird way of letting you manually shift gears – when it’s in Drive, you move the gearshift lever from side to side, for up and down shifting. Usually, you move it backward and forward. The side to side way of doing things meant that sometimes I inadvertently downshifted simply by grazing the top of the lever. It’s a work in progress.

If you want to use the Patriot as a true four-by-four, you should know that there is no low-range. It gets by, as many SUVs and crossovers do these days, on a four-wheel-drive system that’s fine for rainy and somewhat snowy roads, but it’s not going to do what its stablemate, the Jeep Wrangler, can do.

On the highway, the Patriot’s boxy, upright shape means that it moves through the air like a linebacker. No neat coefficient of drag in this big boy – the faster you go, the louder the gale gets, as it passes up the windshield and over the roof.

It’s not clear to me why Chrysler (Jeep’s parent) keeps the Patriot around. It’s based on the mundane Dodge Caliber chassis, it gets average mileage (21/27 mpg, city/highway) and it doesn’t stand out. In fact, it stands back. With its factory price of $28,630, optioned up the way our tester was, you could do better with a myriad of other cars – Subaru Forester, Toyota RAV4 and Honda CR-V come to mind.

Maybe the Patriot has a hidden kinship with the late Republican Senator from Nebraska, Roman Hruska. In 1970, when President Nixon’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, G. Harrold Carswell, was being criticized for being a mediocre judge, Hruska rushed to Carswell’s defense.

“Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers,” Hruska said in a Senate hearing. “They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance? We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.” Carswell did not make it to the top.